Women Empowerment(HARLEEN KAUR WAHI_FT13136)

While the sole purpose of my individual observation project was to understand the working of a general store, I ended up learning a lot more than just that when I paid a visit to Sakthi super market in mahabs.

UNIQUE ASPECT:

The store is one of the results of the Tamil nadu state’s initiative to empower women. The venture falls into the category of self-help groups. They are small homogenous groups consisting of 12-20 women from BPL i.e below poverty line families voluntarily organized to promote savings.

The shop has been rented to these women at a mere rental expense of Rs.5000 per month. These 15 women running the store handle everything from inventory, sales, packaging, display arrangement, etc all by themselves. Despite of an off  season, they have an average sale of Rs.20000 per day.

THE SELF HELP GROUP MEMBER RUNNING THE STORE

GROWING BUSINESS

The shop supplies rice, pulses, spices and condiments to two of the restaurants in the tourist city of mahabs and have already got a fair share of 20 local families who buy all their daily needs from this store. They also provide free home delivery service to all restaurants, hotels and houses in mahabs.

The sales/marketing aspect:

SACHETS/TRIAL SIZE PACKS OF ALL PRODUCTS

The store has neatly aligned displays  and stocks all sorts of daily need products of all leading brands in the country. they not only have family size packs of the products but also offer sachets of the these basic utilities. Unlike most of the other stores which only have shampoo sachets, this one has a huge variety of jams ,detergents, sunscreens, tooth pastes, shampoos, conditioners, oil  in miniature travel sizes of price under Rs 10.

KISSAN JAM SACHETS

PRODUCT PLACEMENT

They have very smartly placed all the family sizes of products like shampoos at an eye level and placed the cheap sachets way below .also they had put in all the products of the same brand together.

Another thing that I observed was that the tooth paste and tooth brush were in different aisles and were very strategically placed to tempt customers to buy the other utility products placed alongside them.

ARRANGEMENT OF CONTAINERS AND SACHETS

BRAND LOYALTY

HIMALAYA PRODUCTS ASSIGNED A SPECIAL RACK

They had a special display for himalaya products as the store has a loyalty tie up with the brand.

GENERIC BRAND/STORE BRAND

The  women running the shop procure all the grains, pulses, spices and condiments in bulk from Chennai and pack them into packets of half and 1 kg in the store room. They sell these packets under the store brand name i.e sakthi  super market right next to the name-brand products .they claim to sell them cheaper by RS.2 per kg in comparison to all the other  brands. The also sell loose rice of more than 10 varieties of price ranging from rs 33 to rs.55 per kg.

STORE BRAND

CUSTOMER COMFORT

1) The store has a generator backup heavy enough to take the load of the air conditioners in the store as well.

2) The 15 women who are running the venture work themselves help people in the aisles and the counters and each of them speak fluent English and tamil.

3) Working hours: 8.30 am-11.30 pm

4 The store even accepts leading debit/credit cards